


make me beautiful

by punkrockbadger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Internalized racism, Male Character of Color, POC Potter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 16:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2276382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockbadger/pseuds/punkrockbadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are very used to not being considered human, to being less than, but her eyes are kind and you lose yourself in possibility for just a little while. Hope’s fairy wings flutter in your heart like a Snitch caged between fingers and you allow yourself to be because it’s something of a rare treat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	make me beautiful

When you see the girl sitting down at your right hand side, red hair flowing over her shoulders like a river overflowing its banks with blood, green eyes alight and freckles painting their way across her face and the backs of her hands like constellations you can’t even begin to map, your first thought is “make me beautiful”. Because hers are the hands that can make you beautiful, tens of hundreds of shades lighter than your own and you don’t feel like you could ever measure up, but for that first night alone, she smiles and says hello first. She asks for your name and you nearly explode into a shower of fireworks just as red as her hair because no one like her asks your name.

None of them would see you as human if you were just someone who walked the streets beside them instead of a government man’s son. You are very used to not being considered human, to being less than, but her eyes are kind and you lose yourself in possibility for just a little while. Hope’s fairy wings flutter in your heart like a Snitch caged between fingers and you allow yourself to be because it’s something of a rare treat. The boy across the table, with curly, sandy blond hair that hangs into his eyes, understands.

There is a kinship there, between the two of you, and your heart breaks for him and the sorrow you feel radiating off him in waves strong enough to knock you over. No one else notices, which you find surprising, and Sirius continues to laugh as if the sadness tenuously contained in the thin frame of the boy sitting next to him isn’t strong enough to flip the world over.

But he will never understand the darkness in your hearts, laying claim to humanity without being afraid that his fingers will stain it.

You are eleven years old and people look at you like you have stolen something, stare awkwardly at your parents at gatherings, and when you are told that you have your mother’s eyes, it is with a grimace that makes you feel dirty and disgusting for having taken something of hers. Because that is what you have done, in their eyes. You take and you take and you take and you can’t make anything from it because their hands, their perfect hands, are the only things that can make things.

Please, you beg, without words. Make me beautiful.

The next day, you trip the wrong boy, the one who called you dirty on the train because of the color of your skin when he bumped into you on the way to the bathroom, the one who slapped the label of a country that isn’t yours onto your face because why bother learning the names of countries that are just subservient to the land he is allowed to be proud of. If you think hard enough, you can feel your heart melting and dripping down to fill your feet with sludge as the train floor rocks beneath you like your grandmother’s arms as she sung you to sleep, her whispered, flowing words like a musical river when compared to the quiet London accent your mother still carries like a rain jacket to shield herself from criticism.

The girl, the girl you wish would make you beautiful, stares at you with disgust in your eyes and you can feel it like a fire burning within you, invading every nook and cranny of your being. You have done her wrong and you will pay and you already feel yourself growing uglier and uglier as she looks at you because you have _done her wrong_ and look at you, you’re disgusting.

The other boy, the one who called you dirty, is perfect, at least to her.

His skin matches hers in a way yours doesn’t and it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t wash his hair because the kind of dirt that stains his skin only does so in patches. You have been dipped and rolled in mud so fiercely that the stains will never come off, that you will forever be marked as different and inhumane and a freak show, and he knows it. He knows it in the way he laughs at you, pathetically backing away with an air of forced confidence strapped to you like a ticking time bomb.

He knows.

Make me beautiful, you think to yourself, but you know that all you’ll hear is no.

Your father once told you that you should never trust the oppressor, that those in power only sought to destroy you, and as you hide yourself under red and gold scarves and red and gold shirts and red and gold and red and gold, you wonder if your blood has turned as brown as the rest of you, because you feel like you are full of the dirt they told you stained your skin brown, the one day your mother let you go to the local primary school.

You spent hours trying to scrub your traitorously brown hands clean, but in the end, all you turned was a violent shade of red, the same red that neatly waves around her face, framing it perfectly.

You just want to be beautiful.

So when the pretty girl with the pale skin that reminds you of the moon asks you to call her beautiful, you say the words without meaning them because you, who are stained and dusty and dirty and unworthy to link your fingers with hers, have no right to call someone like her beautiful.

“You’re perfect.” You say, voice trembling, as you trace her features with shaking hands, committing her to memory while you wait for the day she turns your back on you and declares this a joke.

“I know.” She says, a paragon of confidence despite the fact that her hands are shaking too, and you feel like, maybe, you can fix her just a little bit.


End file.
